Resources

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Fully searchable digital edition of the 1641 Depositions at Trinity College Dublin Library, comprising transcripts and images of all 8,000 depositions, examinations and associated materials in which Protestant men and women of all classes told of their experiences following the outbreak of the rebellion by the Catholic Irish in October, 1641.

Images of legal documents from medieval and early modern England from the National Archives in London digitized and displayed through the O’Quinn Law Library of the University of Houston Law Center by license of the National Archives sponsored by the University of Houston Law Center and Department of History. Useful to anyone working on English history, literature, law, or culture.

The Atlas of Early Printing is an interactive site designed to be used as a tool for teaching the early history of printing in Europe during the second half of the fifteenth century. While printing in Asia predates European activity by several hundred years, the rapid expansion of the trade following the discovery of printing in Mainz, Germany, around the middle of the fifteenth century is a topic of great importance to the history of European civilization.

The Boston College Jesuit Bibliography is a comprehensive online bibliography covering books, book chapters, journal articles and book reviews pertaining to the growing field of Jesuit Studies. In addition to basic bibliographic information, entries include (English) abstracts, detailed subject headings, direct links to items available in electronic format where available, and a link to an item’s WorldCat entry, which shows where it may be located. The database covers more than 1,600 periodicals and is updated regularly. Thanks to generous support of the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College, it is offered as an open-access resource.

a digital library of prints and book illustrations from early modern Britain. It also offers various resources aimed at furthering our knowledge and understanding of them. The core of the project is the database, a fully searchable library of several thousand printed images.

CESAR is a resource French theater of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It offers two major interlinked facilities — a database and an imagebank — but also supplementary materials (complete online versions of key compendia, a corpus of contemporary reviews, police reports and treatises), all of which are accessible from either the database or the imagebank.

Database of the visual culture of the Spanish literary masterpiece La Celestina. It contains over a thousand catalogued records of woodcuts from early editions, engravings, paintings, theatrical productions, etc. In Spanish, soon to be made available in English.

The project aims to explore and visualize how knowledge circulated during the booming scientific revolution of the 17th-century. The CKCC project built a web application called ePistolarium. With this application researchers can browse and analyze around 20,000 letters that were written by and sent to 17th century scholars who lived in the Dutch Republic. Moreover, the ePistolarium enables visualizations of geographical, time-based, social network and co-citation inquiries.

This is a database of some 3,600 citizenship privileges conferred on some 4,000 immigrants to Venice, from the twelfth century (one case) to the year 1500. The search program is easy to use; an introduction to the database is Reinhold C. Mueller’s Immigrazione e cittadinanza nella Venezia medievale, Deputazione di Storia Patria per le Venezie 1, Rome: Viella, 2010.

The Athanasius Kircher correspondence project provides access to the manuscript correspondence of Kircher, a seventeenth-century Jesuit. The project is a collaboration between the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza in Florence, the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, and the European University Institute in Fiesole, under the direction of Michael John Gorman and Nick Wilding; it is now housed at Stanford University.

Cusanus-Portal offers a searchable full text version of the critical edition of the Opera omnia, links to translations of the texts, an encyclopedia on the life and work of Nicholas of Cusa, and a regularly updated bibliography.

DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks allows scholars and students to investigate the publishing, printing, and marketing of English Renaissance drama. An easy-to-use and highly customizable search engine of every playbook produced in England, Scotland, and Ireland from the beginning of printing through 1660

Provides a detailed searchable database for locating printed material relating to the Italian learned Academies active in Avellino, Bari, Benevento, Bologna, Brindisi, Caltanissetta, Catania, Catanzaro, Enna, L’Aquila, Lecce, Mantua, Naples, Padua, Palermo, Rome, Salerno, Siena, Syracuse, Trapani, and Venice in the period 1525-1700 and now held in the collections of the British Library.

A digital collection of searchable descriptions, digital photo-reproductions, and codified transcriptions of the inaugural lectures (also known as paginae) of the single university courses given from the Renaissance to the beginning of the eighteenth century.

The Digital Cavendish aims to highlight digital research and scholarly projects that focus on any aspect of the life and writings of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–73). Research may include digital images, annotations, text-mining, cultural archives, digital portfolios of manuscript and bibliographic research, etc. Ultimately, the site will grow to build a collaborative space for Cavendish scholars and students interested in the areas of literary, historical, digital, textual, bibliographic, manuscript, cultural, feminist, queer, and critical race studies, and become a space for those who wish to share their work.

This project provides digitized editions and research literature on approx. 375 different travels and pilgrimages through Europe in historical times. The bibliographical database allows quick reference for the travel accounts.

A large and comprehensive corpus of letters survives from the twelve years Bodley was on diplomatic business, during initial extraordinary missions as a special envoy to various European sovereigns between 1585-88, and then his long residence in The Hague during his post as English representative on the Council of State for the United Provinces (Netherlands) from 1588-97. These letters, previously unedited and unpublished, are a valuable interdisciplinary resource to scholars of religious, social, cultural, geographical, military and political history. The letters also offer an important understanding of the information networks and patronage structures between official and semi-official diplomatic agents and their patrons in the later sixteenth-century.

EEBO contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and British North America, as well as works in English printed elsewhere from 1473–1700 — from the first book printed in English by William Caxton, through the age of Spenser and Shakespeare and the tumult of the English Civil War. EEBO access is offered to current RSA members at no additional cost.

This ongoing work was conceived as an adjunct to the textbook The Origins of Early Modern Italy, 1550–1800 in order to place at the disposal of students and scholars the complete span of scholarship on Italy published in English and French. The material encompasses all aspects of political, social, economic, and cultural life in the broader Italy, including Corsica and Malta, and the mutual influence of Italy and other European countries. It contains an introduction and historiographical overview, supported by a statistical breakdown of types of studies over the last 150 years.

A research database and educational resource that lets you see what direct use has been made, over the last four centuries, of pre-1642 documents related to professional performance in purpose-built theatres and other permanent structures in the London area. It is not a comprehensive collection of those pre-1642 documents; rather, it charts the copies (or "transcriptions") which were subsequently made of them.

The Emblematica Online project is digitizing two of the world’s largest and most important Renaissance emblem book collections, thereby establishing a digital subject library shared across two institutions, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA (Illinois), and the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, Germany (HAB).

A project to archive broadside ballads from many different holdings. Includes ballad sheet facsimiles, facsimile transcriptions, and recordings, and extensively catalogued and viewed via basic and advanced search functions.

In 1998 the art historian Federico Zeri donated to the University of Bologna his huge collection of art photos (290,000 images). The main core of this photo archive, the Italian Painting section, is now in the online database. Users can consult the catalogue and search by location of the art work as well as by author, subject, date, and technique of photography.

A site dedicated to Matthias Flacius Illyricus (1520–75), a multitalented European thinker of the sixteenth century. Includes information about the Reformation period in present day Croatia and Slovenia, as well as information on a number of Renaissance Italian thinkers. All information on the site is available in four languages: English, German, Italian, and Croatian.

Detailed historical documentation for works of art, including basic information about the artist, title, medium, dimensions, date, and owner of the work, former attributions, provenance, variant titles, records of exhibition and condition history, and biographical information about portrait subjects from the Frick Art Reference Library and its partners in the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) accessible in the Photoarchive’s research database records via NYARC’s online catalogue Arcade.

A complete electronic edition with full-text transcription and facsimile images of all 25,000 seventeenth-century manuscripts of Samuel Hartlib (c1600-62), a great seventeenth-century 'intelligencer' and man of science, set out to record all human knowledge and make it universally available for the education of all mankind.

A project of the Center for Advanced Study of the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, the searchable database includes a complete transcription of every extant notarial record of the period from the Archivio di Stato di Roma identified by the project team, as well as a digital images of the original documents. The site also features artist bibliographies and a database of images associated with the early history of the Accademia di San Luca and its members during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

An annotated, parallel-text edition of Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, which was at once the crowning achievement of Tudor historiography and the most important single source for contemporary playwrights and poets, above all Shakespeare, Spenser, Daniel, and Drayton.

The international database of 15th-century European printing created by the British Library with contributions from institutions worldwide. The database records nearly every item printed from movable type before 1501, but not material printed entirely from woodblocks or engraved plates.

Iter Community facilitates and supports communication, collaboration, and digital project creation for research communities of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It is a social knowledge creation environment, providing a space for users to connect with others in the field, to create and host a digital humanities project, to develop a research community, and to collaborate on intellectual endeavours. While digital scholarship proliferates, output and interaction often occurs in isolation. Identifying and building a team, launching a digital humanities project, and sustaining a community of practice can be a challenge. Iter Community connects emerging academics, established scholars, alt-ac practitioners, and the public over shared research interests and diverse skill sets. We help scholars build and maintain research communities and provide the necessary infrastructure for digital humanities projects.

This website offers a virtual portal for the Jesuitica Project at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Leuven, Belgium. Our goal is to stimulate research into the spirituality and history of the Society of Jesus, on the basis of the rich collections of Jesuit books in the Maurits Sabbe Library. Contains emblemata page with full text books; research pages with secondary literature, and catalogue pages with primary resources.

Includes the unabridged texts of the four editions of this massive work published in John Foxe’s lifetime (1563, 1570, 1576, 1583). Search and view modern transcriptions that keep as close as possible to the original texts, identify the individuals and places that are mentioned in the text, and explore the latest scholarship to understand the sources upon which it was based, and the purposes for which they were deployed. Facsimiles of all the woodcut illustrations in the text can be viewed along with commentaries. Significant passages in Latin and Greek are translated.

The JRP is an open-access website that not only hosts an ever-growing collection of complete scores, but for the first time makes the music fully searchable: in a few clicks you can identify every instance of a given melodic and/or rhythmic pattern. The JRP also provides analytical tools that can be used to gain insight into individual works, the style of a given composer, or the musical lingua franca. The goal of the project is to facilitate a new kind of knowing that brings "big data" into conversation with traditional analytical methods.

A digital research tool for scholarship on Leonardo da Vinci’s Treatise on Painting. The database includes over forty manuscript copies of the Treatise on Painting, dating from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, as well as early printed editions of Leonardo’s Treatise on Painting in Italian (1651), French (1651), and English (1721). The digital archive makes it possible to analyze the text and images of these materials systematically, comprehensively, and comparatively.

Written over the period 1559-88, Herle's previously unedited, unpublished, and overlooked letters are richly textured. They offer a fascinating insight into the information networks and patronage systems of the political administration, as well as valuable material for religious, social, economic and cultural history. This edition has been designed as a hypertext archive in order to maximize the ability to access and retrieve information from the corpus.

A database of 186 lexical texts published or written in England from 1475 to 1702 that hold fully searchable 620,000 word-entries. LEME offers unique digitized access to dictionaries, glossaries, and other lexical texts in a host of languages, focusing on English but including major works in Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish. LEME is hosted by the University of Toronto Library and published (since 2006) by the University of Toronto Press. It grows annually.

An electronic scholarly edition created by Richard W. Bailey, Marilyn Miller, and Colette Moore. The edition gives a complete inventory of material required by scholars and readers: images of the manuscript, a faithful transcript of those images, and a rendering in modern English of this fascinating document.

The Map of Early Modern London (MoEML) maps the streets, sites, and significant boundaries of late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century London (1560–1640). Taking the Agas map as its platform, the project links encyclopedia-style articles, scholarly work, student work, editions, and literary texts to the places mentioned therein. Students will view the landmarks of Shakespeare’s London and learn about the history and culture of the city in which he lived and worked. Teachers will find the map and encyclopedia useful in teaching Renaissance plays and other texts set in London. Scholars are welcome to contribute articles, links, sources, or compilations of data.

The MRFH provides access to early humanist translators and their German works. The project covers the university and the Heidelberg court, as well as the cities of Strasbourg, Basel, Augsburg, and Nuremberg. A total of 144 works from the period of 1450–1500 are listed. The project also covers the transition from manuscripts to printed books. A total of 122 manuscripts and 145 incunabula have been examined and described in detail. The later printed tradition up to the year 1600 has only been included in short entries, which include 273 printings from the sixteenth century. Digital images of manuscripts and prints have been incorporated.

MEI is a database specifically designed to record and search the material evidence (or copy specific, post-production evidence and provenance information) of 15th-century printed books: ownership, decoration, binding, manuscript annotations, stamps, prices, etc. MEI is linked to the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC), provided by the British Library, from which it derives the bibliographical records, and it allows the user at last to combine searches of bibliographical records (extracted from ISTC) with copyspecific records.

“Opening the Geese Book” presents the full facsimile of the two-volume manuscript New York, Morgan, M. 905; selected chants recorded by the Schola Hungarica; videos with historical information; and critical commentary in English and German, codicological analysis, archival sources, and bibliography. Produced in Nuremberg between 1503 and 1510, the Geese Book preserves the complete mass liturgy compiled for the parish of St. Lorenz and used until the Reformation was introduced in the city in 1525. The manuscript is famous for its representations of animals, wild folk, and a dragon. Saints’ days and other festivals can be accessed easily via a drop-down menu.

Project dedicated to publishing in full an online edition of all of Sir Isaac Newton’s (1642–1727) writings — whether they were printed or not. The edition presents a full (diplomatic) rendition featuring all the amendments Newton made to his own texts or a more readable (normalised) version. Also includes translations of his most important Latin religious texts.

Professional performers of all kinds in England and Wales toured to provincial towns, monasteries and private residences before 1642. The Records of Early English Drama (REED) project is discovering fresh evidence about medieval and renaissance entertainment for publication in volumes for all English, Scottish and Welsh counties. The REED Patrons and Performances Web Site is designed to include a wide range of data about professional performers on tour in the provinces – their patrons, the performance venues they used and the routes they took across the kingdom.

UK RED is an open-access database housed at The Open University containing over 30,000 easily searchable records documenting the history of reading in Britain from 1450 to 1945. Evidence of reading presented in UK RED is drawn from published and unpublished sources as diverse as diaries, commonplace books, memoirs, sociological surveys, and criminal court and prison records.

Provides access to an ongoing, partially crowdsourced environmental scan of early modern studies as it intersects with the digital humanities. This scan takes the form of a comprehensive directory of annotated resources, complemented by an annotated bibliography; both are structured by a ReKN-specific taxonomy.

An online source on the library of the 17th-century experimental philosopher and architect, Robert Hooke (1635–1703). The site is comprised of an extensive editors’ introduction and a searchable database of 2,711 records.

Henry Bellingham’s Book is a digital project of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at the Ohio State University. It provides access to the digitized manuscript pages of the commonplace book, as well as supplementary materials to aid the user’s exploration of its contents.

Online database of books printed in current Flanders (Southern Low Countries) from the beginning of print until 1800. Contains a growing number of 16th century editions published in Antwerp and Louvain. Includes references to copies in select Belgian and foreign libraries and some links to online copies. This is an ongoing project, currently the 17th century is the best covered.

Six Degrees of Francis Bacon (SDFB) is a digital reconstruction of the early modern social network (EMSN) that scholars and students from all over the world will be able to collaboratively expand, revise, curate, and critique.

The social edition is a work that brings communities together to engage in conversation around a text formed and reformed through an ongoing, iterative, public editorial process. A verse miscellany belonging to the 1530s and early 1540s.

This is a free interactive e-book on Italian Renaissance architecture that is presented within a cultural and historical context. Extensive use of explanatory graphics makes the content easier to understand.

Temptation in the Archives is an Open Access collection of essays by the late Prof. Lisa Jardine, CBE, Professor of Renaissance Studies at UCL. This collection of essays focuses on key figures in the renaissance. Through the study of such key figures as Sir Constantjin Huygens, a Dutch polymath and diplomat, we begin to see the Anglo-Dutch cultural connections that formed during this period against the backdrop of unfolding political events in England.

The Virtual Paul’s Cross Project uses visual and acoustic modeling software to combine visual images from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with measurements of these buildings made during archaeological surveys of their foundations. The Project also integrates into the visual model the look of a November day in London. The acoustic simulation recreates the acoustic properties of Paul’s Churchyard. As a result, we may hear all two hours of John Donne’s sermon for Gunpowder Day in the space of its original delivery and acoustic context.

A prosopographical study of the English Convents in exile 1600-1800. On the website you will find a database of the membership, family trees, edited documents, maps and analysis of the nuns' experiences.

This site includes the Italian text and Allen Mandelbaum’s translation of the Divine Comedy marked up in XML, an interactive timeline, an interactive version of Botticelli’s Chart of Hell, an array of maps of Dante’s Italy and all three realms of the afterlife, musical recordings of the liturgical chants and hymns mentioned in Purgatory and Paradise, a gallery of more than 600 images, a searchable database, and teaching resources and activities.

A searchable electronic database consisting of the most comprehensive record of Shakespeare-related scholarship and theatrical productions published or produced worldwide between 1960 and 2016. Contains over 145,100 annotated entries.

Subscription required for access (though some material may be freely available)

Arkyves is a website that offers a single access point to a variety of scholarly databases of early modern sources, such as emblems, printer’s devices, fables, adages, mythography, and typography. Its focus is on subject indexing. Subject queries can be done in English, French, Italian and German. By subscription.

The Bibliographie de la littérature française (BLF) is coedited by the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Société d'histoire littéraire de la France, and Classiques Garnier Numérique. The bibliographic tool documents all the studies on French-speaking literature from the sixteenth century to the present day which have appeared between 1998 and the present day both in France and abroad. Conceived as a veritable crossroads of information, it constitutes a unique resource for researchers, professors, students, and, more broadly, all those seeking to inform themselves on French-speaking literature or on a particular writer, theme or period. The online BLF is updated daily, as and when publications are recorded by specialists.

The Brown University Women Writers Project is a long-term research project devoted to early modern women’s writing and electronic text encoding. Our goal is to bring texts by pre-Victorian women writers out of the archive and make them accessible to a wide audience of teachers, students, scholars, and the general reader.

From the Health Sciences Library System at the University of Pittsburgh. Includes Medical Humanities Dissertations: a monthly listing of recent doctoral dissertations worldwide covering aspects of the medical humanities including the history of medicine and science. Full text access to materials requires subscription through other databases.

Iter, meaning a journey or a path in Latin, is a not-for-profit research project with partners in Toronto, Canada (the headquarters), and Tempe, Arizona. Iter was created for the advancement of learning in the study and teaching of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (400–1700) through the development of online resources. Mainly by subscription though some resources are freely available.

The continuously expanding project publishes online the important resources constituted by the well-known SISMEL’s databases (Medioevo latino, the Bibliotheca Scriptorum Latinorum Medii recentiorisque Aevi, the Compendium Auctorum Medii Aevi) and by the prestigious journals published by the Edizioni del Galluzzo. By subscription though some resources are free.

Developed by Oxford University Press, Oxford Bibliographies in Renaissance and Reformation offers exclusive, authoritative, and peer-reviewed research guides to key topics within the field of Renaissance Studies. Combining the best features of an annotated bibliography and a high-level encyclopedia, this cutting-edge resource guides students and researchers to the best available scholarship in the field. By subscription.

Institutions and societies

Founded in 1970, the Folger Institute is a center for advanced study and research in the humanities, which is sponsored by the Folger Shakespeare Library and a consortium of forty universities in the US and abroad. The Institute’s multidisciplinary and cross-cultural programs are conducted as gatherings of mature scholars, faculty, and graduate students from affiliated universities.

Our mission at the Samuel H. Kress Foundation (est. 1929) is to sustain and carry out the original vision of our founder, Samuel H. Kress (1863–1955). We support the work of individuals and institutions engaged with the appreciation, interpretation, preservation, study, and teaching of the history of European art and architecture from antiquity to the dawn of the modern era.

Online exhibits/reference

This exhibition presents Renaissance editions of Dante’s Divine Comedy from the John A. Zahm, CSC, Dante Collection at the University of Notre Dame, together with selected treasures from The Newberry Library.